


i'll have what she's having

by ghost_teeth



Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Banter during sex, Cybernetics, F/F, Smut, Unrepentant PWP, just create your own mental image of cara dune, mild body horror, wireplay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-18 18:20:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29122560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghost_teeth/pseuds/ghost_teeth
Summary: Shand pulls her lips off the bottle with a resonating pop and wipes her mouth on the back of her glove. “Anyway,” she says, as if an ongoing conversation had been interrupted, “want to fuck in the Moff’s bed?”
Relationships: Cara Dune/Fennec Shand
Comments: 8
Kudos: 31
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	i'll have what she's having

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NeverwinterThistle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeverwinterThistle/gifts).



> chocolate box 2021 gift for NeverwinterThistle, who requested some cara/fennec <3 hope you like!
> 
> (gina carano sucks so please feel free to substitute your favorite buff lady in your mental image of cara lmao)

When you’ve lived through enough—split your knuckles open enough times, seen the color of a friend’s insides enough times, created enough locked compartments in the endless filing-cabinet of your mind—you sort of develop a chilly nodding-acquaintanceship with the entire concept of time. Things like age and the passing of years start to exist only as abstractions, the sort of thing that you’re distantly aware happens to other people.

So it’s a hell of a thing, Cara reflects, this sort of adrenaline-rush comedown—to find yourself suddenly feeling the weight of every year you’ve somehow managed to survive all at once. She must be circling the drain of forty by now, she’s pretty sure, but she’s never really taken a moment to catalogue the developing stiffness of her knees, the way her right elbow clicks now when she extends it all the way. She’d almost forgotten that her left hip is being held together by a battery of burning-cold pins and screws, hastily reassembled in the wake of a mortar shell impact by a battlefield surgeon some… shit, fifteen years ago, now. 

“The number of people I’d kill for a hot bath right now has reached double digits,” she groans, shifting her repeating blaster to her left shoulder so she can work her right in a slow, sore circle. Swearing helps, always does, so she indulges in a string of minor blasphemies to take the edge off.

Shand is padding behind her, hanging somewhere just beyond her peripheral vision. Her footfalls are all but silent, solid and sure in a way Cara seldom feels these days. “Triple digits,” the assassin says, and it doesn’t sound nearly enough like a joke. She’s got one of those _voices,_ though, low and smooth like a tumbled stone. It’s the sort of voice that hooks you by the collarbones, invitation and threat in equal measure. Top that off with eyes like a thing that waits in tall grass for some soft morsel to stumble by unawares, and, _well._ The already narrow corridors of the quiet Imperial cruiser seem tighter by the second.

Cara sighs internally. There’s probably a reason why an uncommon percentage of her flings have ended in either a firefight or a mandatory two-parsec separation between all parties. 

Combat does something to Cara’s wiring, she’s learned over the years. She’s never really been able to entirely shed that post-fight meathead swagger that dogged her when she was younger and stupider. Comes of being part of a rebellion held together with little more than guts-and-glory pep-talks and bonding tape and no-whammies, she supposes. There’s something about that moment just after the immediate danger has been dealt with, when her blood is still up but she’s got nothing to lay hands on and break. Times like that, it’s less Carasynthia Dune at the yoke and more some hungry animal, something all stomach and pelvis. 

It’d probably been that animal compelling her to suggest Shand join her in clearing out the barracks, ostensibly to pick off any remaining stragglers before settling in for the night, but more in hopes of finding some quiet corner to shoot her shot. Hardly a two-person job, and the excuse was flimsy as hell, but Shand had agreed with the same sort of easy, laconic disinterest she shows most things that aren’t a firearm or an unprotected neck. Granted, maybe she just didn’t have any more interest than Cara had in watching the hormonal-tropical-bird posturing of four aggrieved Mandos whose little play-nice agreement had almost run its course.

(Well, _two_ aggrieved Mandos, at any rate. Her friend had locked himself in a utilities closet to ride out his identity crisis in peace, and she isn’t entirely sure what Fett’s deal is, vis-à-vis the buckethead club.)

But it’s been a quiet walk, a long stretch of stilted not-quite-conversation, and Cara’s aches are making themselves known. She’s just about come back to herself again, and now, more than a warm body she finds herself craving a warm shower and six or seven hours’ uninterrupted sleep.

Behind her, Shand’s soft-soled boots scuff to a sudden stop, and Cara jerks around, blaster at the ready. “Gideon’s quarters, I’d wager,” Shand says quietly, nodding at a rather ostentatious set of double blast doors tucked away at the end of a little pocket corridor. “Probably should give them a once-over.”

“Five creds says he’s got some poor bastard in shiny underpants cuffed to his bedpost or something.”

The Moff certainly won’t be raising any objections, shackled as he is in the belly of Fett’s ship, face pulped bloody and zapped unconscious by his own stun cuffs. 

As it happens, there’s nobody cuffed to the bedpost or anywhere else (Cara dutifully checks all the usual places a puffed-up little warlord might stash an unfortunate bed-warmer), and the chamber is actually a good deal more austere than Cara might’ve expected from prior experience clearing out Imp nests. The only true concession to Gideon’s rank and ego is the liquor case, a grand glass affair cleverly lit from the inside in such a way that the room is transformed into a soft kaleidoscope of boozy amber, wine red, whiskey gold. 

“Times like this, I realize I went into the wrong line of work,” Shand sighs, running the tip of one gloved finger covetously along the gold-trimmed edge of the cabinet. 

Cara snorts ungracefully before busting the glass with the butt of her blaster. She selects the bottle she suspects she’s least likely to appreciate properly and pulls the cork with her teeth. “Your good health,” she says, toasting Shand with the neck of the bottle before tipping back a sip. Brandy, the good shit, or at least the kind that doesn’t taste like sugared-up industrial waste. She’s no judge, really, but she likes the way it warms her without burning. Shand’s face has gone a bit sour-pinched at the destruction of the beautiful case, so Cara passes her the bottle in apology.

“Could be poisoned,” Shand says, but takes a long pull from the bottle anyway.

“Could be,” Cara agrees cheerfully, and selects another promising-looking cut crystal decanter full of something red and luminous.

Funnily enough, for all her dagger’s-edge elegance, Shand drinks like someone’s jolly old grandpap, fast and sloppy and with an appreciative little lip-smack at the end of every gulp. It makes Cara want to pet her hair, maybe give her a belly rub. She suspects she’d lose a hand or at least a few fingers for her trouble.

Shand pulls her lips off the bottle with a resonating _pop_ and wipes her mouth on the back of her glove. “Anyway,” she says, as if an ongoing conversation had been interrupted, “want to fuck in the Moff’s bed?”

A lesser woman might’ve choked on the sip of wine she’d just taken, but Cara was a shock trooper in another life. Takes more than that to _shock_ her. Ha. This really is excellent wine. “Oh, uh, sure, yeah,” she says, a little hoarse but steady enough. Then she frowns. “Kinda weird, though, right? In his _bed_. Eugh.” Not that she’s going to kick up much of a fuss, regardless.

“I don’t know, I think it’s sort of like dancing on someone’s grave. Destroying someone and then drinking their booze and fucking in their bed? Poetry, far as I’m concerned.” Shand’s shoulders roll in a shrug that looks more like a manka cat preparing to spring. “Besides, that’s what this whole little trip was about, right? What was your plan, to roll me in some poor grunt’s sad little bunk? How’s that not worse? At least Gideon’s sheets are likely to be clean.” Her eyes are still heavy-lidded, lazy, but the corner of her pretty mouth twitches, threatening a smile.

“Fine, so long as you stop reminding me whose bed it is.” Cara’s already finding a safe corner to stash her blaster in, shucking gloves and gauntlets, leaving boots and body armor in a pile. Sure, it might be hotter letting someone else undress you, but she’s learned over years of falling into bed with a comrade-in-arms for a quick-and-sloppy something that it’s generally easier to let everyone deal with their own equipment before getting down to business. 

It becomes apparent that Shand has other ideas when still-gloved hands spider over Cara’s ribs from behind. Shand is a line of steel at her back, and she digs her sharp chin into the space between Cara’s neck and shoulder. She smells like new blood and old leather, brandy and hot metal. It’s a dangerous smell, the kind that gets you hooked fast and leaves you with the shakes.

“Come on,” she croons into Cara’s ear, breath strangely cool. “No fun giving someone a present and unwrapping it _for_ them.” 

“I’m a present now, am I?” But Cara lets herself be turned and propelled toward the bed, goes easily when Shand grabs her by the hips and pushes her down onto the mattress. Shand climbs into her lap, sharp-tailored coat and boots and all, and pushes one gloved hand into Cara’s hair, twisting it around her fingers. 

Shand’s eyes are the color of carbon scoring on a ship’s hull, and this is the first time Cara’s ever seen her smile with teeth. It’s the kind of smile that could cut glass. Her other hand is on Cara’s jaw, the leather of her glove cool against Cara’s suddenly-hot face. “I’m going to bite you,” Shand says matter-of-factly, and, using Cara’s hair as a rein to bare her throat, surges forward to sink her teeth into the flesh just below Cara’s pulse-point.

And fuck _,_ Cara feels that bite _everywhere_ —her lungs, her ankles, the tips of her fingers, hips and thighs and cunt. Something about it sparks sharp and silver off the last whispers of her battle-adrenaline, makes her want to howl defiance at the stars, or tear something apart with her bare hands, or swallow a knife whole. Instead, she laughs breathlessly and wraps her arms around Shand, crushing her close enough that she can measure the breadth of Shand’s ribcage through her coat. She’s thin, hard. 

“Gonna suck my blood or something, Shand?” Cara chuckles, and falls back onto the bed, dragging Shand with her.

“Might, if I could,” Shand says, and twists in Cara’s hold to nip the meat of Cara’s shoulder through her shirt sleeve before pushing herself up on her elbows, just enough to look Cara frankly in the eyes. “Something about you just makes me want to bite you. Chew you up a bit. Been wanting to for days.” Then she’s leaning back down, catching Cara’s bottom lip between her teeth and tugging past the point of comfort. 

Cara yelps and reaches up to seize Shand by the scruff of her neck, pulling her closer so she can turn the bite into something sweeter. “ _Kriff,_ you’re a mean thing,” she groans against Shand’s mouth, and, just to show she can be spiteful too, kisses her slow and gentle and kind, the sort of wedding-night kiss neither of them has any business giving anybody. 

Shand tolerates this with surprising good humor, possibly only because one of her hands is now engaged in rucking Cara’s shirt up over her stomach, up past her ribs and up to her armpits. Her searching fingers find the zipper at the front of the compression garment beneath and work it down, and it’s only then that she seems to realize she’s still wearing gloves. Her fingers are suddenly between their mouths, the texture of the leather a strange shock after teeth and lips and tongue. 

“Off,” she commands, and Cara understands. Delicately, she pinches the leather at the tips of Shand’s index and middle fingers between her teeth, and holds it fast while Shand tugs her hand free of the glove. Then Shand is palming one of Cara’s breasts, rolling a nipple between her callused fingers, pinching just the right side of too-hard. Her hands are cold. Cara finds she doesn’t much mind.

“Go on then, you can bite,” she huffs, hands going for the broad sash at Shand’s waist. “I know you’re thinking about it. I can take it.”

“Well, now I don’t want to. Not if you’re going to tell m—ah.” Shand cuts off on a grunt, rearing back suddenly to sit astride Cara’s hips and catching the fingers that have hooked beneath her sash. She _tsks_ like a disappointed governess and firmly relocates Cara’s hand to her hip. “Ah-ah. Yeah, best leave that where it is, I think.” 

Cara pouts as prettily as she knows how, which she’s certain looks ridiculous on her square-jawed face. She’s just about to whine something like _how come you’re the only one who gets to see the goodies_ when Shand peels the leather of her sash back herself—not a sash, exactly, but something of an access panel, it turns out. She tips her head to the side, face cool as marble as her eyes settle on Cara’s face, the weight of them predator-lazy and inescapable. 

And sure, Cara remembers her friend making mention of something like this in his perfunctory explanation of his strange new alliance. Something about Fett scraping up what was left of this dead woman off Tatooine sand like tooka-shit from a litterbox, outfitting her with some shiny new bits to replace the ones she’d lost to blaster fire. She’d never accuse her friend of being especially detail-minded, though, because he definitely failed to mention exactly how _much_ of Shand has been built back up with durasteel scaffolding, gleaming pistons, and tangles of sinister tubing. 

Whatever Shand sees in Cara’s face has her pulling the panel of her sash back across her belly, but Cara’s hand is on her wrist before she can fasten it closed again. Shand’s dark brows don’t so much as twitch in surprise.

“Well, wait, okay, hang on, are you gonna like, short-circuit if I touch your—” Cara flutters her fingers vaguely in the direction of Shand’s abdomen “—all your _stuff_? Like, is that gonna hurt you or something?” For a moment, Shand just stares at her, and Cara wonders if she’s said something offensive. Shit, of course she’s fucked people with cybernetics before, sort of unavoidable if you want to get your rocks off during wartime, but nothing so extensive. She has no idea if there’s any kind of protocol involved, here. 

Finally, Shand blinks and says, “No, it won’t hurt me, I don’t think. Not unless you’re really trying to.”

“Oh, good, as long as you don’t _think_ it’ll hurt you,” Cara snorts, but she’s tugging at Shand’s wrist anyway, encouraging her to pull the leather panel open again. 

Only some of the parts are new, that much is obvious; like most Tatooine engineering, Shand’s insides are a constellation of scrap and salvage, winks of silver against ragged blackened cabling and oxidized pistons shining with desperate amounts of engine lubricant. Even to Cara’s inexpert eye, it’s obvious that the components have been cobbled together from all corners of the galaxy, cannibalized from droids and ships and vaporators, whatever happened to be at hand. The entire mechanism is a savage, gorgeous testament to survival at whatever cost, and the determined purr of all those disparate parts _working_ despite everything sings counterpoint to the thrum of Cara’s pulse. 

“Can I?” Cara’s hand hovers at the seam where flesh meets machine, and she watches Shand’s face carefully. 

Shand nods. Her eyes are very, very dark.

Where Shand’s fingers and breath are cool, the strange inside of her is hot, well beyond fever-heat. It’s like touching the exhaust pipe too soon after killing the ignition on a speeder, not hot enough to burn, but hot enough to make you think twice about closing your whole hand around it. Cara can’t help but push her hand deep, chasing the hum of the cynbernetics past the steadily pumping pistons and into the places where there are soft things, padded wires that twist and jump like they’ve got agendas of their own, expanses of gelatinous synth-flesh that pulse and kick. She touches gently, carefully, fingertips following synthetic arteries to their termini, mapping out the rigid architecture that holds it all in place.

She’s so engaged in her exploration that she doesn’t notice at first how Shand’s thighs have begun to twitch and jerk around Cara’s hips, that her head has tipped backward and her eyes have slid closed, mouth falling open as if to give voice to a scream or a laugh. 

It’s the sudden acceleration of the machinery’s movements that alerts Cara to Shand’s reaction, and her fingers go still. “Okay?” she asks, other hand coming up to touch Shand’s jaw.

Shand’s throat works for a moment before she manages to form a reply. “Yes,” she croaks. “Just. Intense.”

Cara grins at that, grazes some slippery cable with her thumb just to watch the full-body jerk it drags out of Shand. “Knew this pilot during the war, this Mirialan bastard, they’d had part of their throat rebuilt like this, if you can believe it. All that tubing in there, right? They could get off just giving blowjobs because they liked how it hit the cybernetics. Said it interacted with their whole nervous system, lit them up all over. Not gonna lie, it’s all kinds of fun sitting back with a cold drink and letting a pretty thing like that just blow your strap for like an hour.” She frowns, remembering. “They were kind of a dick though, now I think about it. Fucking card sharp, I swear.”

“Serves you right for playing ca- _haaaa_ rds with a pilot,” Shand manages around a groan. “They’re all cheats— _mmn._ ” She’s flushed now, squirming a bit, clearly caught somewhere between pleased and irritated that Cara won’t let her finish a sentence without tugging or teasing something inside her. In response, Cara lightly tweaks a bundle of wires. Shand’s left leg kicks involuntarily, nearly unseating her, and she swats cattily at Cara’s elbow. 

“Think you could come like this, too?” Cara asks, curious. This wasn’t what she’d been expecting, but she’d be lying if she said she wouldn’t be remembering this fondly in the quiet hours of the night from now on.

Shand seems to give this all due consideration, or at least as much as she can with Cara rummaging around in her abdominal cavity like she’s a cutlery drawer. “No,” is her eventual breathless verdict. “It’s, hmm, fun, sure, but too weird by itself. N-need something a little more traditional, I think.” She rolls her hips pointedly.

Whoever designed Shand’s coat and shoulder-guards had evidently done so with an eye toward ensuring that its removal would necessitate technical specs and possibly an advanced engineering degree. The boots and leggings, however, are easily dealt with. 

“Little worked up, huh?” Cara huffs, taking a quick second to appreciate the almost startlingly sodden black briefs as she peels them down Shand’s wiry legs.

Shand, now pinned like an insect to the mattress by the hand still inside her abdomen, reaches up to seize Cara by the open halves of her compression-wear to haul her in for a toothy kiss. “Don’t let it go to your head,” she murmurs against Cara’s jaw, and bites her earlobe, pinches a nipple. “It’s all messed up in there now. With the cybernetics. Some days, I have to go change my underwear if I feel a particularly nice breeze. Others, I couldn’t get wet if that pretty senator of yours was sitting on my face.”

“Hey.” Shand’s narrow face fits easily in Cara’s broad hand, and she squeezes, just a little, just enough to make Shand resemble an incensed porg for a second. Cara arranges her expression into something grave and reproachful. “That’s my countrywoman you’re talking about.”

Clearly unabashed, Shand wraps her legs around Cara’s waist, crushing her close with thighs and calves like a bear-trap. “My apologies for the disrespect.” She flashes another one of those scalpel-cut smiles. “Come on, then, Marshal Dune. Fuck me until I pledge my allegiance to the New Republic.”

Turns out Shand likes it fast and deep and substantial, three times punctuating her demands for more fingers with savage yanks of Cara’s hair. But she doesn’t want the whole hand, no, she likes the burn and drag of Cara’s thick knuckles at her labia in a way that few people Cara’s fucked ever have. She snarls and bites when it’s good, goes quiet and cold when she’s not enthused. All the while, Cara strums the cables and wiring of her rebuilt abdomen like an instrument she’s just learning to play, tuning her ear to Shand’s noises and keeping time with the pulse she can feel inside Shand’s cunt. 

When Shand comes, the machinery inside her goes perfectly, perfectly still, just for a second. In that instant, Cara wonders if the center of Shand has died entirely, perfectly bisecting the living halves of her.

For the barest handful of minutes before Shand manages to reanimate herself (before she flips Cara over like an egg and eats her out until she screams, before she kneels cruelly on Cara’s calves and curls two fingers inside her over her pubic bone until wet soaks Shand’s jacket sleeve to the elbow), she’s soft for the first time, boneless and maybe a little disoriented. She says _just lay on me for a bit, like that,_ and Cara does, using her considerable bulk to crush Shand’s thinner body into the mattress until her muscles stop spasming and her cobbled-together nervous system re-establishes communications with her extremities. 

“Need a minute,” Shand says, dreamy and distant against the side of Cara’s face as they lie there. “Then I’m going to make you cry.”

Cara grins. “Hell, you can even have _two_ minutes. Got all the time in the world, tonight.”

And the funny thing is, it’s true. They do have time, at least for now. That’s the thing about lives like theirs—violent lives aren’t linear, not really; they’re just a series of bright little eternities to be either endured or seized with both hands. In one moment, Cara is running with a squadron of twenty-five good soldiers, and in all the moments after that there are twelve. In one moment, her friend is holding a child, and in the next, his hands are empty. In some moments, there’s a planet called Alderaan, and in so many other moments, there isn’t. 

Still, in some smaller sparks of time there are always going to be bad drinks in good company, pretty faces that don’t know to hate you yet, a friendly rigged card game or an electric heartbeat inside a warm and wanting body. Sometimes, in this kind of in-between place, this perfect instant of suspension, Cara thinks she can almost see the shape of moments yet to come, can count them like gold coins in her hands.


End file.
